5/27/2002 @ 12:00AM

The Monitors Have Eyes

Chatting online was supposed to be a private affair. Not anymore.

Cheating hearts and delinquent teens beware: New software is stripping another layer off the Internet’s privacy protections.

Called “BeAware with ChatWatch,” the software takes periodic screen shots of a monitored computer, letting a parent or suspicious spouse see everything that crosses the screen, from Web pages and chat to instant messages (IM). A text-search function ferrets out any mention of booze, drugs or the name of the Other Woman. “People assume that IM is not monitored, but with this software, that’s no longer the case,” says
Adam Schran
, 26, whose fledgling Philadelphia firm,
Ascentive
, created the product. The privately held firm, which Schran claims generated $2.2 million in revenue last year, also sells software that speeds up Internet connections and computers.

Monitoring software is proliferating on office networks and home computers, creating a $269 million market for Internet-access-control software. According to research firm IDC, 60% of companies monitor or filter employees’ Internet forays, but generally limit their surveillance to logging which Web addresses employees visit. Ascentive’s new $49.95 program, launched in December for Windows only, gives would-be Big Brothers a broader opportunity to spy.

When BeAware is installed on a network or PC, it can issue a warning that it is watching the chat session–or it can operate in stealth mode to protect itself against disablement by those being watched. The administrator can determine how often the program captures what’s on the screen, as frequently as every ten seconds. The chat-session records, while hardly comprehensive, provide nice snapshots and are saved as a graphics file in a folder on the hard drive or, if you’re really paranoid, to a CD or floppy.

One customer, a Louisiana machine tool engineer, used BeAware to confirm his wife was cheating on him. He caught her exchanging e-mail and instant messages with her lover. (They’ve since put her cyberdalliance behind them.) Another early customer, Schran says, bought the software because he’d realized that someone was visiting pornography sites from his home computer. He wanted to determine whether the porn viewer was his au pair or his teenage daughter. Turns out it was the daughter.

Nosy Nellies throughout the Internet world are taking note. At the Boys & Girls Club in Waltham, Mass., the 12-computer teen center already uses filtering software from SonicWall and the NetSee monitoring program from BirchTree Systems to keep tabs on the 45 students, ages 12 and up, who drop in each afternoon. To monitor the kids’ online activities even further, text search capability “would be helpful,” says the center’s director, Joseph Gaiero.

The software does have some drawbacks. Employers who use monitoring software to catch one employee harassing another over the network, but don’t do anything about it, might be open to a civil suit, says Jonathan Zittrain, who heads the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. It’s also hard to pick through the sheer mass of screen shots. “Someone’s ability to detect something largely depends on how much time the person is willing to spend,” says Seth Schoen, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco pro-privacy not-for-profit.

Another problem with text search is that it presumes the searcher knows what to look for. If you don’t know today’s hip teenage slang for heroin (try Harry Jones or chick), the software can’t help you.

But most privacy experts admit that both employers and parents have a legal right to monitor their computer systems. “It’s not selling out to make sure the Internet is supervised for kids,” says Schran.